Category: Politics

Sometimes I worry about the future of America. Really, I do.

I’m around young people all day and I often get the sense that they just don’t care about what’s going on around them. Their willingness to blindly accept whatever they see on television or read on a website is frightening. I thought teenagers were supposed to reject the ideas of previous generations and blaze a new path.

Thankfully, I came across a story on Boing Boing that reaffirmed my faith in the youth of America, at least a few of them. It seems that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech to law students at Georgetown University. During the speech, he attempted to justify President Bush’s domestic surveillance program.

During the speech, these future lawyers stood and turned their backs to the Attorney General in protest. Other students came in to the room wearing black cowls and carrying a sign with paraphrase of a quote by Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

For all of the details, check out Future American Lawyers to be Proud Of or any major news site, like CNN. This picture sums it up pretty well:

I hope to see more like this in the future.

I saw this over at Planet GNOME and had to share it with everybody. This was originally an e-mail:

There are less than two months until the election, an election that will decide the next President of the United States. The man elected will be the president of ALL Americans, not just the Democrats or the Republicans.

To show our solidarity as Americans, let’s all get together and show each other our support for the candidate of our choice. It’s time that we all came together, Democrats and Republicans alike.

If you support the policies of John Kerry, please drive with your headlights ‘ON’ during the day.

If you support President George W. Bush, please drive with your headlights ‘OFF’ at night.

Everyone remember to support your chosen candidate. I won’t be driving after dark around here until after election day.

I know I said no more political stuff, but I couldn’t resist this:

The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American.

See the insanity for yourself at W Ketchup.com.

I guess this means I won’t be eating french fries at Ben and Paula’s house anymore…

According to this CNN.com poll, over 30% of the people in the US are idiots who will believe what ever they’re told. I didn’t believe it myself, but these numbers don’t lie. Click this image to see for yourself:

What makes this even more interesting are the other stories involved. On the one hand we have the report from the 9/11 commission. Here’s a quote from their report:

The panel said it found “no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”

Then we have the words of the Bush administration:

President Bush repeated his administration’s claim that Iraq was in league with al Qaeda under Saddam Hussein’s rule…

At this point, I would have a lot more respect for the President if he would just own up to it. Sometimes you just have to say “Sorry, I messed up.” But I don’t think Bush is that kind of person. I think he’ll stand by his original statement no matter what.

There’s a photomosaic of the Americans who have died in Iraq since the “war” began at Michael Moore.com.

Thanks to BoingBoing.net for the link.

This headline on CNN.com caught my eye – Bodies of U.S. civilians strung from bridge in Iraq. Here’s a quote from the article:

Video showed crowds chanting and cheering at the scene, with charred corpses hanging from the bridge over the Euphrates.

Can I move to another planet? I’m sick of humans…

This has got to be the strangest press release I’ve ever read – Remarks by the President to the Press Pool. Basically the Whitehouse released a transcript of the President ordering ribs at the Nothin’ Fancy Cafe in Roswell, New Mexico. I’ve read the whole thing twice, I’m still laughing, and now I want some ribs.

Thanks to MetaFilter for the link.

If you vote, then please do a little research before you decide. I don’t care who you pick. To be honest, I don’t think it makes that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things. But please pay attention to what is going on in the world before you make your decision. With that in mind, here are a few interesting stories I’ve read in the last few days.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Paul O’Neill scandal. He’s the main source for the book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. In it he says that from the first day in the White House George W. Bush has been trying to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. CBS News has a nice article about O’Neill and the book. Here’s my favorite quote:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” forcing top officials to act “on little more than hunches about what the president might think.”

Another new book deals with the “Bush Dynasty”. American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips reveals details of the Bush family’s many connections with the Middle East. The website Common Dreams has reprinted an article about the book that originally ran in the L.A. Times. Here are a few nice quotes from this article:

…the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.

In a way this backs up something I’ve thought for a while now – if George W. Bush had not been elected president, the September 11 attacks may have never happened.

The U.S. is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons. As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 “Nightline” program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: “It is becoming increasingly clear that George [H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.”

You can read more about the book and some excerpts at http://www.americandynasty.net/.

Here’s a fun thing to do on a boring Thursday: Go to Google and search for “miserable failure”.

I won’t spoil the surprise for anyone, but just suffice it to say that Google seems to be getting smarter all the time…

I usually don’t mention anything political here… Actually I think the last political opinion I expressed on this site was probably how SUVs fund terrorism, which led to quite a discussion. But, this reading a statement that Tom Ridge made from News.com, I feel like I just have to share it with people.

Tom Ridge is the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. He recently gave the keynote speech at the National Cyber Security Summit. During that speech, he had this to say:

“Terrorists know that a few lines of code could, ultimately, wreak as much havoc as bombs,”

Um, I don’t know about Mr. Ridge, but personally I’d much rather have my computer stop working than have a bomb fall on my house.

I’m sure someone will post a comment that says something along the lines of “but terrorists will write a virus to shut down the power plants!!!!” (except it will probably be in ALL CAPS with every other word misspelled)

To those who think that way, all I can say is why exactly should a computer that controls a power plant be connected to the Internet? Am I actually suppossed to believe that the computers that are controlling the infrastructure of our country are also used to place bids on eBay? If that’s the case then we have much bigger problems than terrorists.